Photography Composition

I've participated in online photo review communities that almost always seem to end up bickering about composition and other rules as if they were absolutes. Such discussions can often miss the underlying art, or photographer's message

In a way, you train your neural networks to see by looking at images, then, while actively photographing you outsource decision making to your own trained neural networks. After a while you can predict the best camera position, settings and get a tingling sensation moments before an interesting situation (in street or event photography) happens.

One of the best parts of photography is the speed at which you can have a conversation with your own visual system, refining it in the process.

Understanding art can be thought of as getting bored and finding something new, which is no longer boring, and repeat. Eventually you find yourself bored by almost everything, but with an intense passion for succinct relatable expression. This is often mistaken for pretension, and many do skip the process altogether; most unfortunately, even people calling themselves artists do so.

My point is all these composition rules are great; it’s invaluable stuff. But, you will get bored of them, and that is the beautiful part.

Today we're able to take hundreds, even thousands, of ridiculously high resolution photographs of a scene. We can program our cameras to do automatic bracketing so we're sure to get the right exposure, and if not we can fix it in post. We're no longer limited to composition before we capture the photo as we can import a series of photos into Photoshop and create panoramic, HDR, composites, and just about anything else years after an event.

I think there is definitely some value in learning a few of these rules because they do help you take better pictures when you don't have the luxury of time to experiment, to plan or control your environment. A prime example is taking photos of your kid at a sporting event. Understanding lines of sight, directions of travel, the rule of thirds, and knowing how to frame the subject can really help you to capture the emotion felt in a very fleeting moment.

Same goes with the light: if you want to know how the camera sees the scene, squint -- it would compensate for extra peripheral light.

Understand and embrace exposure compensation. If your camera doesn't give you rapid access to that control, get a new one. (Thankfully most cell phone cameras do these days.)

90% of crappy Facebook pictures could be made passable if the subjects were correctly exposed. Too often, bright or dark backgrounds are exposed as a dull grey, leaving subjects washed out or in shadow.

If the scene is bright ("high key"), nudge that knob up so it looks bright. If the scene is dark ("low key"), nudge it down so it looks dark. This can completely change the dynamics of a photograph for the better, and will allow you to more readily focus on the aesthetic aspects of photography such as composition.

* look at (and fill) the edges of the frame. Too often, we look at the part of the picture we are interested in (often the center), and ignore the empty/ugly space around it. Look at the edges, and the center will take care of itself.

I've mainly found exposure to be much easier to manage with a good camera.

My 300 EUR camera can focus on the eye, and my 1.8f lens will make the background blurry. All I add is rule of the third. The camera will also measure the exposure according to the face.

And suddenly I made a photo that other people find aesthetically pleasing.

It's going to be interesting ones artificial blur / bokeh and AI compositions are mainstream.

So I crop 1/5 of the image and boost the exposure 2stops. If I do that with a camera just a few years old, the result is terrible.

Now obviously, if the image is bad or completely uninteresting to begin with then no technological thing is going to help. But it's nice crutches for beginners. After I cropped my image to 1/5, I learned what I should have done. In the past, that was a really expensive lesson (the photo was ruined). Now I get the lesson AND the photo.

When I showed it to family members, most of them liked it. Then one of them asked "What camera did you use to take this picture?"

I said "Just an old 6x6 Japanese box, loaded with Portra 400" Maybe someday I'll visit that place again, shoot a 4x5 and make really huge print of it :D

"That's so kind. You have a great mouth!"

(Saw this in a comic somewhere - sadly, I can't find it any more).

[0]: https://www.instagram.com/stavroskorok/

I'd recommend consuming A LOT of photography if you want to get better. Pick a subject matter you want to get good at (landscape? fashion? black and white portraits? etc.) and immerse yourself in the works of the greats of that field. Go to photo galleries, museums, etc., when looking at the picture try to imagine how the image was framed, what choices the photographers made; and then try to emulate a bit of what you see in your own photography.

This is a dilemma of lots of people who shoot professionally - they have photos that they want to keep because of the subjects/moments/memories which are objectively not as good as the photos that could take with the same subjects/moments/memories if they had approached them more as the professional shoots -- they did not.

The solution to that is simple - two different collections. One for the 'Personal photos' and one for 'Excellent Photos'.

> It's annoying as I love it, and I love going out and practicing more. I've read lots on composition etc and how to use my camera but I find it so hard to actually picture the scene in my head and what will make a good photo

Never take one photo. In fact, never take two or three photos. Take dozens photos even if you are just tapping a button on your phone camera app. Move phone left. Move it right. Change angle. Move closer. Move out. But keep pushing the button. After that pull the photos for the same scene into a strip and do an edit. First cull obviously bad photos - out of focus, washed out background if you did not want it, weird dude sucking on his thumb in a corner etc -- you took a dozen photos of nearly the same scene so it is not like you don't have a room to cut. After that do a tennis tournament. Compare two photos side by side. Pick a dinner. Delete the loser. Walk this down to 1 photo for that scene and be amazed at how much better that photos is than the one you thought you were going to get.

> Also, what are peoples throw away rates like? If I go out for a day with the camera and take say 20 photos. I might save 1.

If you have people in the photos, then keeping one in twenty for a day of shooting is a very high and unnecessary precious keep rate ( please don't take it the wrong way ).

Also study non-photographic books as well. I'm mostly interested in shapes and patterns, that's why I read architecture books as well.

BTW, for this learning purpose, I made a decision to only shoot film (mostly 35mm, sometimes medium format). I usually have the Nikon F2 and Minolta spotmeter ready in my bag. Whenever I feel bored at work, I grab my camera and wander around, looking for anything interesting.

By interesting, I mean anything. It doesn't have to be socially profound. It doesn't have to be 'decisive' ala Henri Carier-Bresson. It doesn't have to be dramatic like golden hour scene. Sometimes certain patterns in the window or a small crack in the well can be interesting too. You just need to see them carefully.

If I'm shooting 35mm, 10 out of 36 frames is good enough. Or if I'm shooting medium format, perhaps 5 or 6 out of 12.

Never immediately throw your bad photos. See if you can notice any mistakes/improvement possibilities.

Most of Ansel Adam's photos are crap. How am I so arrogant to say this? Because most of everyone's photos are crap. You just see the good ones.

This was true even in the film days. Read books by photographers who worked in the film era. 1 in 20 is a pretty good rate.

Plus when you zoom out and crop you waste sensor resolution and photon gathering power...

Plus, even an expensive camera suffers at f/22. The only thing you can do is use tilt shift and an actual larger aperture.